Chickensoup For The Privileged Butthurt Soul

I was going to come home tonight and write about the fact that it looks like Mitt Romney’s Quest for The CEOShip of America, Fuck Yeah LLC is deader than Bob Dole’s dick (see here and here) barring a catastrophic event before 11/6 that conservatives will gleefully blame on Barack Obama before the bodies are even cold.

Is that cynical?

Not even close.

But instead I came home to young Conor Friedersdorf stroking his chin and thinking thoughts so deep you’d need a bathysphere and something slightly better than iOS 6 Maps to find them and read them were it not for the profoundly serious pages of The Atlantic which, I should add, once hosted She Who Could Not Count.

But then I got sidetracked by twittertrolls into playing the “You are a horrible moral monster and every time you respond to me I am going to move the goalposts and then change the subject for points redeemable for valuable discounts and prizes from the Jill Stein/Spongebob Purepants Utopian Bagatelle“. Yeah. That happens to me a lot.

Connor Friedersdorf writes the kind of political essay I can’t see anyone but a privileged white person writing. Going as far as to nearly (but not quite he says!) compare President Obama to an apologist for slavery, he can’t stomach voting for Obama because of his policies in Pakistan, drones, etc.

Instead, he says we should vote for Gary Johnson since there’s a candidate who won’t do those things.

In a sense I respect it when people care so much about one issue that they can’t vote for any candidate who disagrees. On the other hand, Friedersdorf doesn’t seem to care one iota about the horrible economic and social policies a Romney administration would enact. He doesn’t seem to care at all about labor, abortion rights, gay rights, environmental policy, etc., etc. It’s all about drones, civil liberties, and such. And Obama has indeed sucked on those issues.

But given that Friedersdorf probably doesn’t have to worry much about his next paycheck or be concerned about having an unwanted fetus in his body, it’s a luxury for him to be a one-issue voter on this particular issue.

Conor, who has identified previously as being somewhat conservative, has decided that he can’t in good conscience vote for Obama because … drones and Yemen and al-Awaki. The fact that the social agendas of Obama and Romney with regard to the poor, the elderly, women, gays, the middle class, and college students are as different as night and day doesn’t factor into his equation. This isn’t to say that Conor lacks empathy for these groups; they’re just not part of his Big Picture Moral Universe where queasiness is more of an existential problem and less the result of being faint with hunger or in need of unaffordable and therefore unobtainable healthcare. That’s fine. That is his issue. And so, after much reflection and navel gazing, Conor has concluded that he shall cast his lot for, and snuggle into, the warm and wooly moral embrace of Ron Paul Lite Gary Johnson because the actual symbolism of voting for Johnson will form an impenetrable protective shield over Pakistani civilians and then Conor can sleep better at night knowing that he has symbolically prolonged a life as opposed to, you know, voting for someone who is actually going to be President and actually, you know, do an actual stuff in the real world.

And if Conor hasn’t sold you on Gary Johnson yet, it isn’t because he hasn’t done his homework.